PromCopilot: Simplifying Prometheus Metric Querying in Cloud Native Online Service Systems via Large Language Models

With the increasing complexity of modern online service systems, understanding the state and behavior of the systems is essential for ensuring their reliability and stability. Therefore, metric monitoring systems are widely used and become an important infrastructure in online service systems. Engineers usually interact with metrics data by manually writing domain-specific language (DSL) queries to achieve various analysis objectives. However, writing these queries can be challenging and time-consuming, as it requires engineers to have high programming skills and understand the context of the system. In this paper, we focus on PromQL, which is the metric query DSL provided by the widely used metric monitoring system Prometheus. We aim to simplify metrics querying by enabling engineers to interact with metrics data in Prometheus through natural language, and we call this task text-to-PromQL. Building upon the insight, this paper proposes PromCopilot, a Large Language Model-based text-to-PromQL framework. PromCopilot first uses a knowledge graph to describe the complex context of a cloud native online service system. Then, through the synergistic reasoning of LLMs and the knowledge graph, PromCopilot transforms engineers’ natural language questions into PromQL queries. To evaluate PromCopilot, we manually construct the first text-to-PromQL benchmark dataset which contains 280 metric query questions. The experiment results show that PromCopilot is effective in text-to-PromQL. When using GPT-4 as the backbone LLM, PromCopilot achieves an accuracy of 69.1% in translating natural language questions to PromQL queries when using. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study of text-to-PromQL, and PromCopilot pioneered the DSL generation framework for metric querying and analysis.